Greece Food Tours

Greece food tours are small-group trips built around Greek cooking, held on the mainland and the islands. Topics run from the laiki agora, koulouri and bougatsa to tiropita, kokoretsi and the Florina pepper. Krokos saffron, the frappé, kasseri and the cheeses and sweets of the islands follow. Related outings appear under Greece small group tours, Greece tour packages and Pelion tours. The full range sits under Greece tours.

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What are Greece food tours?

Greece food tours are trips through Greece built around its cooking. Greek cuisine belongs to the country and to the Greek diaspora, the Greeks who live abroad. Olive oil is its oldest and signature element, and it goes into the bulk of Greek dishes.

The kitchen behind Greece food tours carries on old traditions from Ancient Greek and Byzantine cooking. Byzantine describes the Greek-speaking state that carried on Roman rule in the east during medieval times. Greek cooking also takes in Middle Eastern, Balkan and Italian influences. Balkan refers to the peninsula of south-eastern Europe where Greece itself lies.

Across Greece, climate and terrain have tended to favour goats and sheep over cattle. Terrain describes the surface of a country, with its hills, slopes and plains. Cattle are cows, bulls and oxen raised on farms for their meat and milk. As a result, beef dishes stay uncommon in the kitchens behind Greece food tours.

For Greece food tours, the common street foods of the country include pitas and roasted corn. In this sense, pitas are savoury pies rather than plain flat breads. UNESCO lists Thessaloniki in its Creative Cities Network for Gastronomy, as the first Greek member. Gastronomy means the craft and study of good eating.

• Bread: Bread made from wheat is found in every corner of Greek cuisine.
• Lemons: Lemons arrived in the second century and served first as medicine, later as food.
• Eating out: In Greece, dining out is a common habit rather than a rare treat.

For Greece food tours, typical Greek home cooking includes a dish group known as lathera. These are seasonal vegetables, stewed in tomato sauce and olive oil with herbs. Herbs are leafy plants that cooks use to add flavour and scent to a dish.

Why does the laiki agora matter to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours take place in a land of street markets. The laiki agora, Greek for people’s market, is a farmers’ market found all over Greece. Its stalls sell food, garden tools and household goods. At such a market, growers deal with buyers in person.

The people’s markets behind Greece food tours were founded by political leader Eleutherios Venizelos. Part of his aim was to let farmers sell fresh produce to nearby towns without middlepersons. A middleperson is a trader who stands between the farm and the final buyer. Economists name this practice disintermediation, the removal of such traders from the chain.

Producers are local farmers or beekeepers who come in from towns and villages close by. They run their own farms or beehives and sell what they grow, such as fruit, vegetables and honey. A beekeeper keeps colonies of bees in hives and collects the honey they make. Bees make honey from the nectar of flowers.

Certain laikes, the plural form of laiki, also draw kantines. A kantina is a food stall or snack van, and kantines is the plural. Their cooks make sausages on sticks, long burgers on sticks and soft drinks. For Greece food tours, laikes agores read as a modern form of the ancient Greek agora.

• Size rule: A people’s market can start in any neighbourhood, town or village of at least 500 people.
• Athens count: The downtown area of Athens alone holds 44 laikes agores.
• Name cards: Every seller must show a name card where shoppers can read it with ease.

For Greece food tours, the goods on sale are mainly ntopia, the Greek word for local food. Local here means grown, raised or caught close to the market itself. Fresh fruit, vegetables, leafy greens, eggs and fish all fall under that heading.

How does the koulouri ring fit into Greece food tours?

Greece food tours are trips through a country where one bread carries a city’s name, Koulouri Thessalonikis. The name means koulouri of Thessaloniki, a sesame bread ring from Greek Macedonia. It is a type of simit, another name for the same ring bread.

On Greece food tours, the ring goes by koulouri, and Greeks still eat it regularly. Its roots lie in the Byzantine Empire, where the bread was called boukellon. Byzantine writers describe a ring-shaped loaf of barley or wheat flour that soldiers liked. Barley, like wheat, is a grass grown for its grain.

For Greece food tours, another root of its names is the Ancient Greek word kollyra. A root here is an older word from which later names grow. In English, the bread goes by Turkish bagel or simply koulouri. A bagel is a ring-shaped roll of dense, chewy bread.

Before baking, the dough rings of simit are dipped in water and molasses syrup. Molasses is the dark, sticky syrup that remains once sugar is refined. Related ring breads elsewhere are poached in boiling water instead, much like bagels. To poach is to cook gently in liquid kept near the boil.

• Seeds: Sesame covers the crust as a rule, with poppy, flax or sunflower seeds as rarer choices.
• Local styles: Size, crunch and chewiness change slightly from one region to the next.
• Breakfast: A typical Greek breakfast can include koulouri beside rusks, bread, honey and fresh fruit.

For Greece food tours, koulouri also has relatives beyond Greek borders. Certain Romanian breads called covrigi are close to simit. The places that sell them even go by the name simigerii. Covrigi is the plural word in Romanian for these ring-shaped breads.

What story does bougatsa bring to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours belong to a country where bougatsa is a breakfast food, sweet or savoury. Greeks also eat it as a snack in the middle of the morning or at midday. Savoury food tastes salty or sharp instead of sugary.

The name comes from the Byzantine Greek word pogatsa. That word goes back to a Roman term meaning hearth bread. A hearth is the spot where a fire burns in a home. For Greece food tours, bougatsa was earlier a basic food for Greeks of Cappadocia under Byzantine rule. Cappadocia lies in central Anatolia, within modern Turkey.

Its modern version took shape in Northern Greece, above all in Serres and Thessaloniki. For Greece food tours, both cities belong to Greek Macedonia, in the north of the country. Today, shops known as bougatsadika or bougatsopolia trade in bougatsa alone. Both Greek words name a shop devoted to this one pastry.

For Greece food tours, traditional bougatsa starts with phyllo dough made by hand and folded round a filling. Phyllo, also spelled filo, is dough stretched into leaves almost as fine as tissue. A recipe lays about 5 buttered phyllo sheets into a baking tin. The bougatsa then bakes until the phyllo turns crisp and golden brown.

• Feta version: One savoury bougatsa holds feta cheese inside its crisp layers.
• Meat version: Another is filled with minced beef, blended with either pork or lamb.
• Neighbour pie: Banitsa is a similar pie that comes from the kitchens of Bulgaria.

Factory machines now roll the phyllo for the bulk of modern bougatsa. For Greece food tours, the hand-made kind still survives in certain cafes and bakeries. These stand above all in the smaller towns and villages across Greece.

Which old recipe lies behind tiropita on Greece food tours?

Greece food tours are trips through the home of tiropita, a Greek pastry whose name means cheese pie. Layers of buttered phyllo hold a filling of cheese mixed with egg. It comes as a small wrapped pie or as a large pie cut into portions.

For Greece food tours, Epirus, Thessaly and Central Greece hold a strong tradition of filo dishes. These regions also keep special regional pitas, or savoury pies, of their own. Farther north, Kichi of Kozani is a local cheese pie of Western Macedonia. It counts as one type of tyropita, the other spelling of tiropita.

According to certain scholars, tiropita descends from the ancient placenta cake, also called plakous. Cato the Elder recorded a placenta recipe in De Agri Cultura, written in 160 BC. He describes placenta as a sweet dish of cheese in layers. In this sense, placenta means a flat cake of dough layers filled with cheese.

Placenta still names a flat baked pie with cheese in Aromanian and in Romanian. Aromanian is the language of the Aromanians, a minority people who also live in Greece. For Greece food tours, the Turks of Central Asia developed pan-fried layered breads in the Late Middle Ages. Pan-fried bread cooks on a hot, greased pan.

• Kasseropita: Made with kasseri cheese, the pie can take the name kasseropita.
• Spanakotiropita: This version holds spinach as well as cheese in its filling.
• Name: Tiropita joins two Greek words, one meaning cheese and one meaning pie.

The ancient tyropatinum, described by Apicius, sounds close to tiropita in name. Despite that, it was a sweet custard with no crust at all. Custard is milk and egg cooked until it sets soft. For Greece food tours, the two share a sound, not a recipe.

Why is kokoretsi an Easter name for Greece food tours?

Greece food tours unfold in a country where kokoretsi traditionally belongs to Orthodox Easter celebrations. It comes to the table as an appetiser, while the main dish of lamb is still roasting. An appetiser is a small plate that opens a meal.

Kokoretsi wraps seasoned offal in the intestines of a lamb or goat. Offal covers the edible inner organs of a slaughtered animal. The filling can hold sweetbreads, hearts, lungs or kidneys. Sweetbreads are glands from a young animal. For Greece food tours, the preferred wrapping is the intestine of a suckling lamb.

For Greece food tours, a dish identical to modern kokoretsi first appears in the cooking of the Byzantines. Byzantines here means the people of the Greek-speaking medieval empire. In Turkey, the word kokorec for the dish comes straight from the Greek name kokoretsi. Kokorec is the Turkish spelling of the same word.

The meats go onto a long skewer, and the intestine wraps round them to hold them in place. A skewer is a thin metal spit pushed through food for cooking. The roll then roasts on a horizontal skewer over charcoal, gas or an electric burner. Horizontal means lying flat and level, from side to side.

• Griddle style: A different version cooks chopped innards with tomatoes and green peppers on a large griddle.
• Serving: The cooked roll is chopped or sliced, scattered with oregano and set on a plate.
• Aromanian table: The Aromanians, a people with their own cuisine, also prepare kokoretsi.

For Greece food tours, gardouba, or gardoubakia, is the name Greeks give to a smaller kokoretsi. Cooks can grill it just like the full-size roll. They can also roast it in a pan or cook it in the oven.

What sets the Florina pepper apart for Greece food tours?

Greece food tours are journeys through a country whose north grows the Florina pepper. It is grown in Western Macedonia, in the wider area of Florina, which gives the pepper its name. Western Macedonia forms the north-western region of the Greek mainland.

For Greece food tours, the pepper has a deep red colour and the shape of a cow’s horn. It starts out green and ripens to red after the 15th of August. Botanists place it in the capsicum genus of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. In plant naming, a genus gathers species that share close family ties.

The seed reached the region from Brazil in the 17th century. Locals planted it in Florina, Prespes, Veroia, Aridaia and Kozani. Only in Florina did the crop succeed, as it adapted to the local climate and soil. In time, the other areas stopped, and Florina became the only producer.

In 1994, Florina’s red peppers won Protected Designation of Origin, or PDO, status. Only peppers from the named area can then carry the name. For Greece food tours, Aetos, a small village in the Florina area, hosts a yearly feast of peppers. It takes place as August ends, with live bands and pepper dishes for every guest.

• Stuffed: After roasting, each pepper can take a filling of feta, rice, shrimps or meat.
• Stored: The peppers can also be dried, canned, frozen or pickled for later use.
• Appetiser: Roasted and sliced, they make an appetiser dressed with garlic, sea salt and olive oil.

For Greece food tours, the red pepper is known across Greece for its rich, sweet flavour. It goes into a wide range of dishes in Greek kitchens. Canned forms of the pepper are also exported to other countries.

How does Krokos, the saffron town of Kozani, connect to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours are trips through a land where the town of Krokos makes world-famous saffron. This small town lies 5 km south of Kozani, in Western Macedonia. It was once the seat of the local municipality of Elimeia.

Saffron is a spice taken from the flower of Crocus sativus, the saffron crocus. The flower is sterile and blooms in autumn. Sterile here means it sets no seed. For Greece food tours, the crimson stigmas and styles are the parts picked and dried, known as threads. A stigma is the tip inside a flower that catches pollen.

Krokos is home to a cooperative of saffron growers with 2000 members. These members live across 40 small villages of the area. In a cooperative, the members share ownership and decisions alike. Yearly output ranges from 6 to 12 tons of pure red saffron, depending on the weather.

For Greece food tours, the saffron crocus possibly descends from Crocus cartwrightianus, also called wild saffron. This wild plant is native to mainland Greece, Euboea, Crete, Skyros and certain Cyclades islands. A native plant grows wild in a place without help from people. In this sense, descends means springs from an older plant line.

• Population: The 2021 census counted 2,687 people living in the town of Krokos.
• Red saffron: No other region of Greece produces red saffron, so Kozani is its only Greek source.
• Flower count: About 150 crocus flowers give just 1 gram of dried saffron threads.

For Greece food tours, Greek red saffron from the Kozani cooperative has a guaranteed colouring strength of 230. Colouring strength measures how much colour a spice gives to food. A higher number means a deeper colour from the same amount.

Which Thessaloniki story explains the frappé for Greece food tours?

Greece food tours belong to the home country of the frappé, a Greek iced coffee. Instant coffee of the spray-dried kind goes in with water, sugar, ice and milk. Spray-dried means the coffee was turned into powder with jets of hot air.

For Greece food tours, the Greek frappé is said to date from the 1957 Thessaloniki International Fair. At a trade fair, makers put new products before buyers and visitors. Dimitris Vakondios wanted his usual instant coffee during a break but found no hot water. Instead, he shook it in a shaker with ice cubes and cold water.

The word frappé is French, and it names drinks cooled with ice. In French, frappé literally means punched, and figuratively shaken. Figuratively points to a looser, image-based sense of a word. In postwar Greece, the frappé grew into a hallmark of outdoor coffee drinking. A hallmark here means a stamp of identity.

For Greece food tours, the thick foam on a frappé comes from its coffee type. Spray-dried instant coffee contains almost no oil, and that lets the foam build up. The drink almost always comes with a drinking straw. The reason is that the foam on top tastes unpleasantly bitter to a large number of drinkers.

• Sweetness: Ordered glykos, or sweet, a frappé gets 4 spoonfuls of sugar to 2 of coffee.
• Spoon-made: Spoon-stirred versions are koutalatos, spoon-made, or karavisios, of the ship, after sailors at sea.
• Freddo espresso: Freddo, Italian for cold, names a Greek iced espresso that Athens first made in 1991.

For Greece food tours, the frappé gained fame abroad at the Athens Summer Olympics of 2004. Tourists at those Games grew fond of the drink, and a newspaper in Los Angeles wrote about it. Abroad here means in countries outside Greece.

What does kasseri cheese add to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours sit within a country whose law gives kasseri cheese a protected name of origin. The cheese must come from one of four areas: Thessaly, Macedonia, Lesbos or Xanthi. In Macedonia, producing areas include Chalkidiki, Florina, Grevena, Imathia and Kastoria.

For Greece food tours, the same cheese can be made with cow’s milk too. In that case, it cannot be sold as kasseri in the European Union. Each producer then sells it under a name of its own. The European Union is a bloc of member states with shared rules on trade and food.

Kasseri is semi-hard to hard, smooth rather than crumbly, and chewy, with a hard rind. A rind is the tough outer layer that forms round a cheese. Cheesemakers place it in the pasta filata group, beside mozzarella and aged provolone. Pasta filata, an Italian term, refers to cheeses stretched into threads as they are made.

For Greece food tours, kasseri curd is sliced and kneaded in water at 70 to 80 degrees Celsius. Curd is the thick, set part of milk that separates from the liquid whey. The work goes on until the mass stretches into one smooth strand at least 1 metre long.

• Balkan cousin: A similar cheese across Turkey, Romania and the Balkans goes by the name kashkaval.
• Kitchen use: Kasseri goes into sandwiches and into saganaki, a dish of fried cheese.
• Moulds: After kneading, makers salt the cheese and set it into moulds.

For Greece food tours, one story ties the name kasseri to Turkish kaser and Hebrew kosher. Kosher describes food that is fit under Jewish law. Yet rennet, which sets milk, does go into kasseri, so the tale looks like a mistaken folk story.

How does kopanisti cheese fit into Greece food tours?

Greece food tours cross the Cyclades, an Aegean island group. There, Tinos, Andros and Syros make kopanisti, a salty cheese. It carries PDO status, a European label tying a food to its home. The cheese is pink and spicy, with heat from fungal growth.

Kopanisti owes its peppery bite to fast lipolysis and proteolysis. These terms mean the breakdown of fat and protein. Heavy microbial growth, meaning the spread of tiny organisms, drives both. Greek makers use cow, sheep or goat’s milk, or a blend of them. Each new batch starts from a portion of an older one.

Greece food tours wind through islands where kopanisti starts as milk cooked with yeast. The heat stays at 28 to 30 degrees Celsius until the milk turns thick. Yeast is a tiny single-celled fungus. Makers then dry the mass and add red chili peppers and salt. Next, the mixture sits in cotton cloth in a pot, under a stone.

The stone helps the cheese shed its extra liquid. Greece food tours belong to a nation where makers finish aging kopanisti in containers. By tradition, those containers are earthenware, meaning pottery of fired clay. In Turkey, the cheese goes by the names kopanisti peyniri and acı peynir. The second name means bitter cheese.

• Turkish home: Kopanisti is also made in the Çeşme and Karaburun districts of İzmir Province.
• Turkish milk: In Turkey, cheesemakers normally use goat’s milk for this spicy cheese.
• Fungus: Still wrapped in cloth, the cheese matures and lets its fungus grow.

Greece food tours share the Aegean with Mykonos, where kopanisti has been made for over 300 years. The favourite way to serve the cheese is a dish called mostra. It sets kopanisti on dry bread with chopped tomatoes and olive oil.

Why is ladotyri from Lesbos worth knowing for Greece food tours?

Greece food tours take place in a country whose island of Lesbos makes ladotyri. This cheese holds PDO status, a legal tie between a food and its region. Makers keep it in extra virgin olive oil. In Greek, the word ladotyri means oil cheese.

Ladotyri takes sheep milk alone, or a mix with goat milk capped at 30%. Makers set the milk with added rennet at 32-34 degrees Celsius. Rennet is a natural substance that turns milk into soft lumps called curds. Makers then break up the curd and reheat it to 45 degrees.

Greece food tours span the Northern Aegean Islands, where Lesbos has made ladotyri since ancient times. Its curds are pressed down in the vat, a large tank, into one compact mass. That mass is cut into pieces of 5 to 7 kilos. Each piece goes into a special mould, where hands press it firmly before salting.

Greece food tours unfold in a land whose ladotyri gained European Union protection on 12 June 1996. That award followed a Greek ministerial decision, a minister’s formal order, from 1994. Livestock, cheese and olive farming are key to farm life on Lesbos. The cheese counts as an emblematic, or symbolic, product with strong cultural ties for locals.

• Old method: Keeping cheese in oil was common until home fridges spread in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Animal diet: The milk must come from local sheep and goats that graze on the area’s plants.
• Sales: The larger share of ladotyri goes to supermarkets rather than straight from farms to buyers.

Greece food tours move through a country where the version made for wide sale is named graviera. Graviera consumption fell from 1998 to 2005. In the same years, demand for PDO ladotyri rose. The PDO list calls it sharp and salty, ripened in jars of oil.

What makes Syros loukoumi a sweet to know for Greece food tours?

Greece food tours happen in a country where the island of Syros is famed for loukoumi. Loukoumi is the Greek form of Turkish delight. That treat is a gel of starch and sugar. Greeks have enjoyed it since the 19th century or earlier.

Across the Balkans, a region of south-east Europe, the sweet’s names come from Ottoman Turkish lokum. Ottoman Turkish was the language of the old Ottoman state. The Greek word loukoumi shares those roots with the modern Turkish name. Sellers market it as Greek Delight. In English, people once called it lumps of delight.

Greece food tours sit within a land that knew an older sweet of this kind. The Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking eastern Roman state, had a lokum-like dish. Its names were paloudakin and apalodaton. The Byzantines took it from the Arabs and kept no fixed recipe. Writers called it honey-yellow starch candy of sugar melted in rosewater.

Loukoumi is also made in the northern cities of Thessaloniki, Serres and Komotini. Greece food tours cover a nation where this treat replaces biscuits beside a cup of coffee. Rosewater and bergamot give the standard flavours. Bergamot is a fragrant citrus fruit. Loukoumi flavoured with mastic, a tree resin, is very popular too.

• Cubes: The sweet comes in small cubes, each dusted with icing sugar to stop sticking.
• Hospitality: Greeks treat loukoumi as a sign of hospitality and refined manners.
• Guests: Hosts offer it with tea or coffee to visitors, as a mark of warmth and respect.

Greece food tours operate in a country that also makes akanés, a sweet similar to loukoumi. Only the town of Serres makes akanés. Premium Turkish delight holds chopped dates, pistachios, hazelnuts or walnuts in its gel. Cinnamon and mint are other common flavours.

Why does mizithra whey cheese matter to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours range over a country where mizithra is widespread, with Crete as its main home. It is a whey cheese, or a mix of milk and whey, from sheep or goats. Whey means the liquid part of milk that separates from curds.

The mix holds 7 parts milk to 3 parts whey. They bring the milk to a slow boil and then curdle it. Curdling means making milk set into soft lumps. Rennet, a natural setting agent, does this, as does whey from an older batch. Lemon juice, vinegar or a freshly broken fig twig also work.

Greece food tours journey through a land where the curds then go into a cheesecloth bag. The bag hangs up so the liquid drains away. Cheesecloth is a thin, loose cotton fabric. The dripping whey can set the next batch. In time, the cheese copies the bag, with a round base and a cone-shaped, wrinkled top.

Fresh mizithra is eaten plain or baked into pies. Salting and aging change it, making it drier, denser, saltier and more sour. Greece food tours travel in a country that calls this form xynomizithra, meaning sour mizithra. It is a cheese for grating. The aged form is well suited to sprinkling over hot pasta.

• Added milk: The sour cousin, xynomizithra, holds about 15% full-cream milk in its mix.
• Shape: Xynomizithra comes as a truncated cone, meaning a cone with its tip cut off, or a ball.
• Dessert: Xynomizithra is commonly served with honey, which turns the sour cheese into a dessert.

Greece food tours are set in a country where mizithra looks soft, snow-white, creamy and moist. For xynomizithra, makers strain sheep or goat whey, then heat and stir it. The curd rests briefly before draining in moulds. A mould is a shaped container.

How does paximadi, the Greek rusk, connect with Greece food tours?

Greece food tours run in the homeland of paximadi, a hard Greek bread similar to a rusk. A rusk is bread baked twice until dry and crisp. Bakers make it with whole wheat, chickpea or barley flour. It resembles Italian biscotti.

The name paximathia comes from the Greek word paximadion. That word is thought to come from Paxamus, a Greek author of the 1st century. Paxamus wrote a full cookbook. The word first shows up in a recipe by Galen, a Greek physician, or doctor. His recipe was for laxative biscuits, which help the bowels move.

Greece food tours trace a land where farmers, Byzantine soldiers and thrifty priests ate paximadia. Thrifty means careful with money. Farmers soaked the bread in water and olive oil to soften it, then ate it in the fields. Homemade cheese and a handful of olives were at times its only partners.

In the past, bakers fired outdoor ovens for this bread once every ten to fifteen days. Bakers then cut it into thick wedges. The wedges went back into the ovens to dry, which kept them from spoiling. Greece food tours spread across a country where paximadia was a staple, or basic food, on Crete.

• Extras: Eggs, vegetable oil, cinnamon, cloves and orange zest can join the flour.
• Modern baking: Bakers now leave it overnight in switched-off ovens, where the leftover heat cooks it.
• Eptazymo: A version of the bread made with chickpeas goes by eptazymo or eftazymo.

This gentle baking dries the bread without the brittleness that makes it crumble. Greece food tours are held in a country where damp pieces of paximathia go into salads. Greek bakeries sell it, and at breakfast it comes with marmalade or cheese.

What are spoon sweets, and how do they relate to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours run across a nation where hosts offer spoon sweets as a sign of welcome. These are sweet preserves served on a spoon. A preserve is fruit kept by cooking in sugar. In Greek, glyko tou koutaliou means sweet of the spoon.

Almost any fruit can become a spoon sweet, and sour or bitter fruits are prized. Soft watermelon and melon flesh falls apart, so cooks use the rind. Green, unripe walnuts and even rose petals also work. A good one keeps the fruit’s shape, colour, smell and taste.

Greece food tours belong to a country with a snow-white spoon sweet called vaníllia. Despite its name, it holds no vanilla. It is a thick paste made by whipping table sugar into mastic resin. The Aegean island of Chios is famous for that resin. Cold, it is as hard as caramel, and it softens slowly as it is licked.

Served on a spoon inside a tall glass of iced water, vaníllia is called a vanilla submarine. Greece food tours run in a country where cooks boil whole fruit gently in water and sugar. They keep boiling until the syrup sets. The two keys to good spoon sweets are said to be patience and a heavy pot.

• Colour: Lemon juice keeps the fruit’s colour, since its citric acid prevents oxidation, a reaction with air.
• Rose geranium: Leaves of this fragrant shrub flavour the boiling fruit and are especially popular in the Ionian islands.
• Texture: The method matches marmalade, but the fruit pieces stay firm, whole and chewy.

Greece food tours take place where spoon sweets arrive with coffee and cold water. The Patriarchate of Constantinople, a leading Orthodox church seat, treats vaníllia as its official sweet. The Greek diaspora, meaning Greeks living abroad, took the treat as far as Japan.

Which ancient roots does pasteli, the sesame bar, bring to Greece food tours?

Greece food tours run in a nation where sesame candy is called pasteli, from Italian pastello. It is a flat, oblong bar, meaning longer than wide, made with honey. Nuts can join the honey and sesame. Rhodes makes a similar candy known as melekouni.

This sweet presses sesame seeds together with honey or sugar into a ball, bar or wafer. Its texture can be chewy or crisp. In ancient Greece, itrion was a thin biscuit or cake of sesame seeds and honey. Herodotus, a Greek historian, also wrote of sweet sesame and honey cakes, without detail.

Greece food tours cross a country where ancient Crete made koptoplakous, also called gastris. It sandwiched a layer of ground nuts inside two sheets of honey-crushed sesame. Another ancient cake, kopte sesamis, used pounded sesame. Pounded means beaten into small bits. Its ingredients point to a close match with modern pasteli.

In the Byzantine Empire, writers described a sesame sweet seen as the ancestor of pasteli. An ancestor is an earlier form. Among those writers were John Tzetzes and Theodore Prodromos. They called it sesamous and said people ate it as everyday food. Greece food tours take place in a nation whose pasteli descends from that Byzantine sesamous.

• Weddings: John Choumnos recorded it at weddings, where it stood for fertility and healthy children.
• Today: Greeks still eat pasteli at weddings, keeping up the old Byzantine custom.
• Other names: The same sweet also goes by the names sesame bar, sesame crunch or sesame candy.

Greece food tours belong to a land whose sesame bar has relatives far afield. Sesame candy is popular across East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. It also has fans in parts of Europe and in Australia.

Why does Chios mastic stand out among sweets for Greece food tours?

Greece food tours unfold in a country whose island of Chios has long produced mastic. Mastic is a resin, a sticky natural gum, from the mastic tree. Its Latin plant name is Pistacia lentiscus. Chewing softens it and turns it bright white.

The sticky drops seep from glands in this evergreen shrub. Evergreen describes a plant that stays leafy through every season. Its taste starts bitter, then turns fresh, like pine and cedar. The word mastic is thought to link to an Ancient Greek verb meaning chew. One of its earliest uses was as chewing gum.

Romans added mastic, honey, pepper and egg to a spiced wine called conditum paradoxum. In the Ottoman Empire, the sultan, or ruler, took the finest mastic crop. Greece food tours sit in a nation whose Chios lies eight nautical miles from Turkey’s Çeşme peninsula. Limited mastic production has also taken place on that peninsula.

Across the Eastern Mediterranean, cooks put mastic into brioches, ice cream and other desserts. A brioche is a soft, rich bread made with butter and eggs. Greece food tours run through a country where mastic flavours drinks, chewing gum, sweets, breads and cheese. It also steadies the texture of loukoumi and ice cream.

• North Africa: In the Maghreb, the north-west of Africa, mastic keeps meringue and nougat stable.
• Scent: Perfume makers describe the aroma of mastic as balsamic, green, spicy and woody.
• Holy oil: Mastic is an essential part of chrism, the holy oil of Eastern Orthodox Churches.

Greece food tours cover a land whose word mastic is also everyday Hebrew for chewing gum. In the Levant, mastic goes into booza, a Levantine ice cream. The Levant covers the lands along the eastern Mediterranean coast. Morocco uses it to prepare smoked foods.

What do travellers ask about Greece food tours, and what are the answers?

Greece food tours raise four common questions about island food: protected cheeses, louza, Ionian sweets and almond cookies. Greece’s protected cheeses mainly use sheep milk, or sheep and goat milk together. Amygdalota cookies are sized to be eaten in a single bite.

Before Greece food tours, what does PDO mean for island cheeses?

PDO marks a food tied by law to its home area. In 1996, the European Union registered 19 Greek cheeses as PDO, fixing their home areas and methods. These cheeses use fresh milk and traditional methods. Kalathaki Limnou, a cheese kept in brine, or salty water, comes from Limnos.

On Greece food tours, what is louza from the Cyclades?

Louza is preserved pork loin from the northern Cyclades islands of Mykonos, Syros, Andros and Tinos. Across Mediterranean Europe, makers first salt or brine cured pork tenderloin, then dry-cure or smoke it. Dry-curing preserves meat with salt and drying. The word louza, like its cousins, comes from Latin lumbus, meaning loin.

For Greece food tours, which sweets belong to the Ionian Islands?

Of all Greek regions, the Ionian Islands show the strongest Italian influence in food. This comes from a long era of rule by Venice. Venice is a city in Italy. Across these islands, pasteli and mandolato rank as common sweets. On Zakynthos, desserts include frigania, fritoura and rafiolia.

Ahead of Greece food tours, what are amygdalota?

Amygdalota are almond cookies linked with the Cyclades. Their name translates as almond pears. They hold no coconut, yet people sometimes call them Greek macaroons. Honey can sweeten them, and orange flower water or rose water can flavour them. Orange flower water is scented water made from orange blossoms.

Featured photo: Annatsach, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.